'You're Pathetic. Worthless. Stupid. A Failure."
Every day Gumball reminds himself how much of a worthless pathetic burden he is. Every day he's reminded of how stupid and incompotent everyone thinks he is. Every day he's made to feel like an idiot...
Woo, that one was a doozy to write! I know I said on April 1st that this would be coming out "later today" but, well, this ended up taking a lot longer than I anticipated.
Originally this started out as a suggestion for a Sibling Oneshot, with the prompt being "What if Gumball's dealing with some personal stuff, and Anais notices something is up, but, he isn't so sure he's comfortable telling a 4-year-old about his personal issues, especially his little sister,"
So, Gumball is struggling with some personal issues and is reluctant to tell Anais. Simple enough. What Gumball's "Issues" actually were was left up to me to decide. So what should they be?
Well, during my EWW series, I had noticed how often the family seemed to mistreat and belittle Gumball, laughing at him he suggested he could do well on the aptitude test in The Genius, saying some pretty harsh things to him across the entire series, and everything else that's described in the story. t didn't seem to affect him that much in the show, which gave me an idea.
What if it he had? What if all of the harsh and cruel things his family had done to him had stuck with him, and worn down his mental health? This would of course be too dark for the actual show to do, and I don't at all consider this to be 'canon' or what Gumball actually feels. This is more of an AU, where that stuff had hurt and affected him a lot more.
I felt this was too dark and serious for a Sibling Oneshot however so decided to make it a separate standalone one instead. I tried my best to treat the subject matter with as much respect and dignity as I could and I think it turned out really well. This is definitely one of my longest individual one-shots, and I'm super happy with how it turned out.
I'm also really happy with how the cover art turned out. I had the idea for it and just had to do it, and it's easily one of my favorites I've ever made.
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The background was originally just gonna be white with some dark shadows slowly creeping it, but then I accidentally made the shadows pixelated and it reminded me of the Void, which I thought was an even better aesthetic.
I wonder if any of you can work out where I got Gumball in that pose from? The background gives a bit of a hint...
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed, and stay tuned for more oneshots and stories to come!
